So I’m working away on a Server 2008 box yesterday and fire up the DNS console, and I’m reminded of a bug that’s been hanging around this console since, ummm, the year 2000. When you right-click a node in the navigation pane of the console, you sometimes don’t see the correct context menu. You have to left-click the node first, to select it, THEN you can right-click it and see the correct context menu.
This goofy behavior is almost a decade old and it’s starting to make me mad. How tough is it to program a right-click so that it operates as it’s supposed to? More importantly, what sort of QC does Microsoft have, if a bug like this persists for almost a tenth of a century?
Microsoft has been working hard to penetrate the enterprise server market, and they’ve made inroads. But to dominate that market, you need to inspire confidence and you need to show you can sweat the details. Sure, a context menu problem is just a GUI issue and hardly mission-critical, but it’s emblematic of the “we’ll fix it in the next release” attitude that has kept Microsoft from winning the hearts and minds of the industry’s most demanding techies. It’s reasonable to ask Microsoft this question: If you guys can’t get a context menu to work right, how can we trust you to do the more complicated stuff right?
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